Japan, once the centre of the world’s consumer electronics industry, has suffered a fresh blow to its collective corporate prestige after Panasonic warned that it expects to lose almost £6 billion this year.

Like Sony before it, the Osaka-based company has posted huge losses after falling behind in the television and mobile phone markets and has announced that it will not pay a dividend this year for the first time since 1950. The decline of two of the most famous names in electronics has been made all the more galling by the rampant success of their South Korean rivals — Samsung